NBA draft is no surprise party

Not much gets by scouts these days

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, June 24, 2003

The kind of player who makes an NBA general manager look like a fortune teller.

A six-time All-Star, Dumars was chosen No. 18 overall in 1985, taken just after Dallas had selected Bill Wennington and Uwe Blab with consecutive selections. Stop laughing.

But in the 18 years since Dumars was drafted, the cracks have gotten smaller. Either that or it's no longer as difficult to read the future. Not with all the scouting reports and video compiled for the NBA Draft tomorrow in New York.

"There just aren't many secrets anymore," said Dumars, now the Pistons president. "People know who's out there.

"Occasionally you're going to have situations like Gilbert Arenas, who goes in the second round. You just don't see that that often anymore. Where before you could always count on four, five, six guys in the second round."

The Pistons hold the No. 2 pick, which they will use to select Darko Milicic. They also hold the No. 25 pick in a time when it's getting tougher to find All-Stars outside the first 11 picks. And that's right where the Sonics will be selecting should they stand pat with the 12th and 14th overall choices.

And that's the crux of the question facing the Sonics, who hold two first-round choices and one even bigger mystery of who will become the third star to complement Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis.

That's the constellation general manager Rick Sund described after the season. Allen is a three-time All-Star, and Lewis is a player Sund sees on the cusp of that stardom, but the Sonics need at least a trifecta to contend in the Western Conference without a dominant center.

But that was a generation ago in NBA terms. And today, it's tougher to find franchise cornerstones outside the top picks in the draft. On that everyone agrees.

"That was a different day, and one of the reasons (Malone, Drexler and Stockton) probably lasted that long is because a lot of players stayed in college three or four years," said Ernie Grunfeld, Milwaukee's general manager. "You didn't have as many young players, and there was a lot more time to follow them and see their progress and see their improvement."

In the past five seasons, there have been 16 All-Stars who were chosen No. 12 or later -- or in two cases went undrafted. Of those 16 players, two came straight from high school: Jermaine O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. Three were international draft choices: Vlade Divac, Peja Stojakovic and Zydrunas Ilgauskas. The other 11 players were in college for four years, without exception.

That contradicts the trend in which fewer and fewer players are staying through four years of college.

"Somehow kids believe that if you stay four years and you're coming out of the draft after four years, you're considered a failure, that you weren't good enough," Sund said. "That theory is not right at all, but kids think that."

The draft has become a prediction of potential. A bet on the come, if you talk about it in gambling terms. For the top-end players, it has worked out. Players like Allen Iverson, Stephon Marbury and Elton Brand have been All-Stars despite none of them playing more than two years of college basketball.

But for underclassmen chosen outside the first 11 selections, the record has been much spottier. The last time a college underclassmen who was not a lottery selection made the All-Star Game was 1998.

"One of the reasons is that players chosen in the middle of the first round are going to teams contending for a playoff spot," said Donnie Walsh, Pacers president. "They're usually not going to play right away. It takes longer for them to reach their potential."

And for a player not steeled by four years of college, the idle time on the bench erodes their potential, either stunting growth or stopping it altogether. That was certainly the case with William Avery, chosen with the No. 14 pick by Minnesota in 1999. He never averaged more than three points in three NBA seasons and is now out of the league.

It's even rarer to find an All-Star past the first round now. Going back to 1998, only five All-Stars have been chosen outside the first round. Compare that to a similar window from 1988-92, when there were 12 All-Stars who were not first-round picks.

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And now matter how you count it, there are fewer and fewer players like Dumars, who slip through the cracks. And 18 years after he was chosen No. 18, that just makes Dumars' job as Pistons president more difficult.